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59The Metaphysics of MeasurementIn John Forge (ed.), Measurement, Realism and Objectivity Essays on Measurement in the Social and Physical Sciences, Reidel. 1987.My thesis is that there are good reasons for a philosophical account of measurement to deal primarily with the properties or magnitudes of objects measured, rather than with the objects themselves. The account I present here embodies both a realism about measurement and a realism about the existence of the properties involved in measurement. It thus provides an alternative to most current treatments of measurement, many of which are operationalistic or conventionalistic, and nearly all of which …Read more
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20C. Stephen Layman. The power of logic. Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, Calif., London, and Toronto, 1999, ix + 566 pp (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 7 (1): 79-81. 2001.
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68Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think of it, in the sense that people in Germany speak German, is a historical or social or political notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one another than various dialects of Chinese are. But the rough, commonsense divisions between languages will suffice for our purposes.
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45Sense and NonsenseCanadian Journal of Philosophy 9 (4). 1979.“What kind of psychological theory could relate our use of words to sets of possible worlds?” So queries a recent author, but the question is rhetorical, the insinuation being that any analysis or explanation of semantical notions in terms of possible worlds will involve an account that won't square with a naturalistic view of language acquisition or use. Such feelings are widespread; my purpose here is to argue that they are unjustified.
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56Kantian DerivationsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (3). 1983.Although Kant's attempts in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to derive statements of specific duties from the categorical imperative have received much attention, there is still disagreement over the strategies of particular derivations, the status of the auxiliary assumptions employed therein, and the principles at work in the derivations generally. Yet an understanding of these matters is indispensable for a proper understanding of the Groundwork and bears on a much wider class of e…Read more
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133Complex predicates and logics for properties and relationsJournal of Philosophical Logic 27 (3): 295-325. 1998.In this paper I present a formal language in which complex predicates stand for properties and relations, and assignments of denotations to complex predicates and assignments of extensions to the properties and relations they denote are both homomorphisms. This system affords a fresh perspective on several important philosophical topics, highlighting the algebraic features of properties and clarifying the sense in which properties can be represented by their extensions. It also suggests a natura…Read more
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17C.I.Lewis’s calculus of predicatesHistory and Philosophy of Logic 16 (1): 19-37. 1995.In 1951 C.I.Lewis published a logic of general terms that he called the calculus of predicates. Although this system is of less significance than Lewis’s earlier work on proposition...
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486» The Nature of Natural Laws «Australasian Journal of Philosophy 60 (3): 1982. 1982.That laws of nature play a vital role in explanation, prediction, and inductive inference is far clearer than the nature of the laws themselves. My hope here is to shed some light on the nature of natural laws by developing and defending the view that they involve genuine relations between properties. Such a position is suggested by Plato, and more recent versions have been sketched by several writers.~ But I am not happy with any of these accounts, not so much because they lack detail or engend…Read more
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5Abstract entitiesIn Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Blackwell. 2008.
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311Structural representation and surrogative reasoningSynthese 87 (3). 1991.It is argued that a number of important, and seemingly disparate, types of representation are species of a single relation, here called structural representation, that can be described in detail and studied in a way that is of considerable philosophical interest. A structural representation depends on the existence of a common structure between a representation and that which it represents, and it is important because it allows us to reason directly about the representation in order to draw conc…Read more
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